To establish whether active pharmaceutical ingredients or narcotic drugs are present in an individual in the body, analyses in various body materials can be carried out in the laboratory. A laboratory analysis is generally required when abuse is suspected. This plays a role in addiction medicine, as in the case of drug abuse or medicament abuse or the checking of drug withdrawal, in the case of the monitoring of the absence of drugs in the workplace or in the case of forensic questions. When body materials (e.g. blood, urine, saliva, secretions, puncture fluids, tissue biopsies) are sent to an analytical laboratory, it is not always guaranteed that the sample sent can be unambiguously traced back to the individual from whom it actually originates. It is possible that accidental or intentional sample swapping or tampering occurs. This risk occurs especially in the case of urine samples, which are particularly suited to drug analysis, since they are acquired non-invasively and the medicaments and drugs and metabolites thereof excreted in urine are present in a higher concentration than in blood and can be detected for a long period. Also, the profile of the metabolites makes it possible to provide additional information relating to the metabolism in the body.
Whereas the investigator must be directly involved at the side of the test subject during the withdrawal of blood, saliva, puncture fluids and biopsies and a visual check thus takes place at least during the withdrawal of sample, this does not always occur during the collection of urine or the deposition of feces. Although questions relating to medicament abuse and drug abuse require that the urine body material typically used for analysis be surrendered in plain sight, this cannot always be ensured. The structural conditions need to be present and the privacy of the test subjects needs to be respected. However, in the absence of supervision, there is, specifically in the case of urine, an especially large risk of manipulation and, in particular, surrendering of a urine sample from another individual, i.e. a fraudulent sample.
To uncover material substitution, procedures have been established in which the individuals are required to orally ingest marker substances which are excreted via urine as parent substances or as metabolites in urine. If the marker substances or the metabolic products thereof are not detectable in the tested urine, it is suspected that a sample from another individual has been surrendered.
European patent No. 1 410 014 B1 describes a method which makes it possible for a sample taken from an excretion, from a mammal body fluid or as a tissue sample to be identified with regard to the origin of the sample.
German patent application DE 10 2008 061 174 describes a method for identifying biological samples.